The real imams of O.C.

Jamaal Diwan, the resident scholar at the Islamic Center of Irvine, delivers announcements to Muslims during evening prayers for Ramadan on Tuesday. JOSHUA SUDOCK, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Jamaal Diwan, resident scholar at the Islamic Center of Irvine, socializes with area Muslims during an evening feast before Ramadan prayers at the center Tuesday. JOSHUA SUDOCK, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Jamaal Diwan, the resident scholar at the Islamic Center of Irvine, delivers announcements to Muslims during evening prayers for Ramadan on Tuesday. JOSHUA SUDOCK, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Jamaal Diwan, left, resident scholar at the Islamic Center of Irvine, socializes with area Muslims during an evening feast before Ramadan prayers at the center Tuesday. JOSHUA SUDOCK, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Jamaal Diwan, the resident scholar at the Islamic Center of Irvine, observes Ramadan with fellow Muslims at the center Tuesday. JOSHUA SUDOCK, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Jamaal Diwan, the resident scholar at the Islamic Center of Irvine, delivers announcements to Muslims during evening prayers for Ramadan on Tuesday. JOSHUA SUDOCK, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Jamaal Diwan, second from right, resident scholar at the Islamic Center of Irvine, socializes with area Muslims during an evening feast before Ramadan prayers at the center Tuesday. JOSHUA SUDOCK, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

1 of 9

Jamaal Diwan, the resident scholar at the Islamic Center of Irvine, delivers announcements to Muslims during evening prayers for Ramadan on Tuesday. JOSHUA SUDOCK, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

1 of 9

Jamaal Diwan, second from right, resident scholar at the Islamic Center of Irvine, socializes with area Muslims during an evening feast before Ramadan prayers at the center Tuesday. JOSHUA SUDOCK, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

In less than a decade, Leadership at several of Orange County's largest and most influential mosques has begun passing from an older generation of foreign-born, nonnative-English-speaking imams to a new, young cohort of rap-listening, jeans-wearing, basketball-playing, American-born Muslims.

“I think within five to seven years, half the mosques (in Southern California) will be headed by (imams) who are local or American-born or raised,” said Suhail Mulla, assistant imam at the Garden Grove mosque. “That's a huge shift. Five years ago, there was not even one.”

There are no national statistics showing the birth origins of imams at American mosques. But roughly a fifth of Southern California's 110 mosques are led by native-born imams, said Shakeel Syed, executive director of the Shura Council of Southern California, a Muslim umbrella organization covering Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Mulla, 41, said he knows of at least a dozen more young Southern California Muslims training to become imams.

Until recently, mosques in Southern California and the rest of America served a mostly foreign-born population of immigrants anxious about their place in a new world and yearning for reminders of home.

“I get calls from around the country, emails,” said Mustafa Umar, the 31-year-old Ferrari-loving educational director at the Islamic Institute of Orange County mosque in Anaheim.

“(They say,) ‘Please, find me anyone who somewhat resembles you. Someone born here with a degree in Islamic studies. Someone who finished High School in America. We'll pay whatever it is. We'll give them whatever incentive.'”

Umar was lured to the Anaheim mosque with promises that he could found a college of Islamic studies to train more young men and women like him.

Umar was raised in Tustin and educated at UC Irvine and at Islamic studies institutes in India, Egypt and France. He felt spurred to pursue a career in religious leadership by childhood memories of barely intelligible sermons and mind-numbing religious classes that nearly drove him away from faith.

“These imams from abroad just can't speak to the American context,” he said. “They don't understand the issues and the challenges and the doubts people go through here.”

The inaugural semester of Umar's College of Islamic Studies in Anaheim last fall included 350 students. Another 250 enrolled in spring. Three classes begin this fall, along with another six offered online. All are taught by Umar and attended mostly by young, professional Muslims looking to expand their knowledge of the faith and explore a possible second career in religious leadership.

Nowhere is the youth boom in contemporary Islam more evident than at the Islamic Center of Irvine, known throughout Southern California as “the youth mosque,” according to Yasmine El Haj Ibrahim, a 19-year-old co-leader of the mosque's thriving youth program.

Two hundred teenage and preteen Muslims, some from as far away as Bakersfield and San Diego, gather at the mosque every Friday evening for classes, socializing and a basketball game with the mosque's 30-year-old imam, Jamaal Diwan.

Diwan, raised in Torrance and a graduate of UC San Diego, played varsity basketball in high school. He didn't become a Muslim until he read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” in college.

Before that, “I professed atheism,” Diwan said. His parents, from Pakistan and Canada, were not religious. He spent his childhood playing basketball and body boarding at the beach. In college, before religion, his main obsession was alternative rap collectives such as Atmosphere and The Roots.

In fact, it was those rappers, as much as Malcolm X, who moved Diwan toward faith. A college friend from South Los Angeles opened his eyes to the social inequalities critiqued in progressive hip-hop. Malcolm X moved him to try the Quran.

“I was in my room one night and decided I wanted to become a Muslim, and I started praying,” Diwan recalled.

That experience of coming to faith as an outsider helps his ministry immeasurably, Diwan said, especially his work with youth. “I can relate” to youthful struggles, he said. “I know exactly what you're going through because I've been there, too.”

When Diwan arrived at the Irvine mosque a year ago, he immediately revived the youth program, which had languished. He preaches in English, not Arabic. He joined a local interfaith council, speaks to civic groups and attends Muslim student group meetings at local high schools.

He maintains a Tumblr page and posts video of classes and sermons online.

A challenge, he said, is earning the respect of older, more traditional members of the congregation, who remain attached to the cultural expressions of Islam they grew up with abroad.

“People understand not their religion but what they're accustomed to doing. But that's not religion. So there's a struggle,” Diwan said.

That struggle between old and new, faith and secular American culture is common to all three of Orange County's native-born imams.

Diwan, Mulla and Umar told stories of youthful rebellion and alienation (Mulla said he was arrested for breaking and entering; Umar said he survived a car crash after running away from home) followed by a return to faith and a hunger for religious knowledge that couldn't be satisfied in the U.S.

To date, American Muslims have concentrated more on building mosques and responding to anti-Muslim attitudes than on establishing schools and creating a system for fostering young leaders.

Young Muslims seeking religious training must go abroad to established universities in places like Egypt and India, as Diwan, Mulla and Umar did after graduating from college in the U.S.

Umar said his College of Islamic Studies in Anaheim is an attempt to provide religious training closer to home, further encouraging young leaders to step forward.

“There's a huge hunger out there,” he said. “The community is demanding this.”

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